He did a great many things for the grocer, from seven o’clock in the morning till six at night, but his principal work was to place large paper bags on the scales and fill them with flour from the barrel.
When the bag weighed twenty-three pounds, Sammy had to seal it up and take it to the family it was ordered for. The grocer allowed him two cents for every bag he carried, over and above his wages, which were $2.50 per week. Some weeks Sammy made over $3.00 which helped his mother to run their little house quite comfortably.
Now, Sammy, in his thoughtlessness, used to sample quite a good deal of the grocer’s preserved ginger. Every time he would pass the tin boxes of ginger, he would thoughtlessly take a piece, and it would disappear in the recesses of Sammy’s rosy mouth.
One night, after he had locked up all but the front door of the store, he helped himself to quite a large piece of the ginger, and walked home.
He did not care for any supper that night. He felt as if bed was the best place for his troubled little stomach.
He hadn’t been in bed two minutes when a little fierce man, with a white cloth round his black body and a huge grin on his ebony face, bounded into his room.
With a scream Sammy leaped out of bed and bounded out of the window. With a yell the Indian was after him. Sammy flew down the road like a runaway colt, the black man in his rear yelling like thunder and lions. Sammy never ran so fast in his life, but the little black man gained on him, and finally caught him!
Sammy pleaded hard to be spared to his mother, but the little man grimly took him by the collar, and with one leap landed him on the island of Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, at a place called Kandy. Then he led Sammy out into the country, and blew a whistle. In an instant they were surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of men, women and boys, all as black as Sammy’s captor. Sammy cried:
“What have I done! what have I done!” and they all cried:
“You have taken the ginger that we have gathered by hard work, without permission, and you are condemned to live here for the rest of your life on ginger alone!”